Posts by The Indomitable Gall

Pioneering spidernaut snuffs it after short Smithsonian stay

Preserve it in aspic.

Preserve the body in aspic. Or maybe even amber, for extra Jurassic Park kudos.

Forget fluorescents, plastic lighting strips coming out next year

@AC re: LEDs

"The cost is to high and the reliability hasn't been that good. Of the twenty I've bought so far 4 of them have failed within the first week which gives me reason to doubt I'll get the advertised 20,000 hours of use from the remaining ones."

Failures in solid-state semiconductors are generally rare. Early failure normally indicates a manufacturing fault. And manufacturing faults usually result in early failures.

IE expect the duff ones to die very quickly, and expect the decent ones to last a long time.

Chinese student fails job interview because of iPhone

"the gesture" @ Ole Juul

"But I am puzzled at to why the kid would pull out any electronic aids at an interview other than to make an impression. That gesture by itself is suspect in exactly the ways detailed by the interviewer."

Let me suggest a perfectly innocent reason: maybe it went off during the interview, and he wanted to silence it. Benefit of the doubt, yes?

Microsoft Surface with Windows 8 Pro gets laptop-level price

Exactly.

Two different devices. One's a tablet, and the other's a laptop. With a very shitty keyboard.

The Lord of the Rings saga lies hidden deep in your Mac

Legal implications...?

Is it just me that thinks it would be utterly hilarious if Apple got ripped open by the Tolkien estate for this one...?

Re: I remember a time

When I was a student in Edinburgh, he AI department used fish for the workstations, ran out of common ones, and started onto methods of cooking them. The CS department used Scottish islands but were running out of names and was resorting to various little skerries and sea rocks on the admiralty charts....

Staples to offer in-store full color 3D printing service

The pragmatist in me...

The pragmatist in me says "horses for courses". No-one buys a differential gearbox at Staples anyway....

Six of the best Nintendo Wii U games

The point/devs.

"Until devs start to actually make use of the hardware in the WiiU fully, I just don't see any point getting it when I have my current consoles."

Which devs? Me, I'm think Android, Linux and PC hackers. If I can use a Wii U Controller with them... cool. My wee Galaxy can sit in my pocket while benefitting from a bigger screen and proper game controls, or pipe my Skype between the controller and the net. And when I get home I can do the exact same thing with my PC. At work, I could use it with dual-screen on my PC to control presentations with more finesse, previewing the next slide before announcing it and changing the order of slides on the fly to respond better to my audience and cover subjects that repeat without having to copy slides (and risk versioning problems when I start editing).

Scoop! The inside story of the news website that saved the BBC

Ads before vids...

Yup, annoys the hell out of me here when I go to watch a 30-second video and get forced to watch a 1-minute advert first.

Of course, that's exactly the same reason why I never watched the ITN channel in MSN video back when I was living in the UK, so it's hardly specific to the BBC....

Hyphenation

Hyphens haven't been "banned", people have just started giving sensible advice about when to use them. A compound term can be pronounced as one word, two words, or something in between. If it was pronounced as one word, it would be "dumbingdown". If it was pronounced as one-and-a-half, it would be "dumbing-down". But it's pronounced as two clear, distinct words, so it's "dumbing down".

There was a period of "hyphen escalation", where the policy was "if in doubt, hyphenate", but it was never "correct" per se.

Ten weird Chinese mobile phones

...that would be awesome!

(Until you want to send a text.)

Badges for Commentards

New HTML...?

But wait, this box says "Plain text only -- no HTML allowed"...!

Is there a list of all permitted HTML somewhere?

Jock and Awe: Scottish schools' sixty-mil 'slab splurge

Oh dearie me no....

I can't say I'm enamoured of this idea at all. I'm Scottish myself, and a teacher -- although at present I'm teaching at a university overseas. As you might guess, that makes me a language teacher, and I really can't see the use case for this at all. I'm not a luddite -- far from it: I've just left a career in IT management, and in my spare time I'm developing language learning software, so theoretically I have an interest in "a tablet in every schoolbag". The problem is that I see the touchscreen interface influencing pedagogical decisions too much, leading to (most likely) the use of trashy Rosetta Stone "click the right picture" tasks, as well as the word juggling of the "fridge poetry" style tasks that are gaining traction in the online language sphere.

What's missing is the keyboard, which is key to my whole workflow.

People rail against keyboard-based language learning on the grounds that language is primarily aural. This is true, but then again that's why you've got a teacher in the classroom! IT in schools should be a supplement to instruction, and written language is a supplement to spoken language. The synergy is obvious: talk in class, write at home. And "writing" means "typing", which means "keyboards", which means "sod off, tablet!"

Pong creator turns nose up at Nintendo Wii U

The flaw in your argument....

Wireless HDMI.

A powerful smartphone can already generate HD on the fly. If we accept graphics 1.5 gen out of date, a smartphone can double as a console...

Heroic Register reader battles EXPLODING COMPUTER

Offboard PSUs...?

Seriously, isn't it time we took the least reliable and most potentially damaging component (not to mention a major heat source) *out* *of* *the* *big* *box*?!?

Convert your iPad into a foosball table and relive the dot-com days

The privilege of seeing things in relation.

The fact that this appeared around the same time as the article on magazines puts me in mind of the "Innovations" catalogue of the 90s. Lots of cool gadgets and gizmos of minimal practical use....

The secrets of spacetime revealed - on your workbench!

Surely shome mishtake?

"As an aside, the experiment takes advantage of yet another bit of quantum strangeness. It proposes using a single photon – but the lenses I mentioned at the top are designed to focus the light wave so that it’s the same size as the block. Wave-particle duality in practice!"

Erm... isn't strangeness a property of quarks? How can a photon exhibit strangeness? Careful with the terminology now....

Jubcropgate: El Reg in snake-fondling nude nipslip outrage

OUTRAGE!!!!

If you look back at the comments to the original story, there wasn't any outrage -- the problem was that El Reg had broken the sacred code of NSFW. A few people were worried about corporate JDAs and off-the-shoulder eyeballs. This article is just overstating it for amusing effect.....

Lawrence 'Empire Strikes Back' Kasdan to pen future Star Wars script

Pedantry....

I thought the verb "divvy" was pretty much accepted these days, leading to a regular past form of "divvied"...?

Re: Why not...

A) They're crap.

B) They're derivative and unimaginative.

C) They're based on an interpretation of the single mention of the term "clone wars" that isn't in line with the meaning introducing in the prequel trilogy.

Do you know a chimp who's feeling doleful? Mid-life crisis, probably

IT angle...?

Come on, El Reg -- where's the IT angle? I'll give you a clue: Belize. Running from the cops with someone young enough to be his granddaughter. How could you have missed it?

Ten Linux apps you must install

However...

If you're a fan of the command-line, then you should heartily approve of anything that fits the proper Unix computing model and interfaces with a command-line tool rather than reinventing the wheel -- hence ClamTk, GParted, LuckyBackup and SMPlayer. This sort of tool prevents coders from migrating away from command-line apps by keeping them relevant and accessible to all users.

And in fact this is our best weapon in the war against bloat: low coupling, high encapsulation, high reusability.

Freeview to be nudged down to clear 5G bands in 2018

Elvis has left the building.

<-- But he left this lovely sequin jacket behind.

Re: The master plan...

The free Sky line up is different from both Freeview and Freesat. In fact, I'm surprised they didn't get their arses sued off for trademark infringement when they called it "Freesat from Sky"....

The master plan...

What they're no doubt hoping for is that we all get so bloody sick of digital terrestrial that we all buy Freesat boxes and they can switch the whole bloody thing off and sell off the bandwidth to some silly startup when the Web 3.0 bubble starts....

Alan Sugar's YouView loses brand judgment in court

Re: I have not been paying attention

Maybe they're not exactly the same, but there is still a fuzzy overlap and the potential for their brand to be cast into shadow. I personally can't believe Microsoft were thick enough to call their remote management suite "SMS". It may be in a different technical domain from text messages, but it didn't mean there wasn't room for confusion. Just try explaining to the non-techie manager that you're going to upgrade the software via SMS. Go on -- I dare you.

So there is the potential for incidental brand damage, even though they're not in direct competition....

'I'm a PIRATE' confessions spew from OED iPhone dictionary

Re: I don't get it... #2 ..

Dictionaries have always been expensive to compile, and a well compiled dictionary is a very valuable thing. And a good dictionary that's *installed* rather than "on the cloud" is a heck of a lot easier to use (and potentially cheaper in the long run, given mobile data price gauging....

UK's planned copyright landgrab will spark US litigation 'firestorm'

Re: Can't wait

If a law is in breach of international laws, I believe that a foreign individual may have recourse to sue the state, rather than just the company....

The GPL self-destruct mechanism that is killing Linux

@Lee Dowling

The Torvalds vs Tanenbaum argument wasn't resolved to say "Linux is better" but "Linux is quicker and easier to produce". I don't think Tanenbaum ever argued against that, but rather suggested that Linux was quicker and easier to write because it was a hack. Ideologically, I'm on the side of the microkernel, but practically, I use Linux because it's there, and because there's stuff for it. And I use Windows more often than Linux, because there's even more stuff for it.

But with the volume of people working on Linux now, I don't see why there isn't a concerted effort to shrink the kernel. It would save a lot of the "roll your own" work required for installing on non-standard or Frankenstein systems. (And it might help get rid of that persistent laptop backlight problem...)

BBC in secret trial to see if you care about thing you plainly don't

Economies of scale...

As DAB sets are effectively UK-only, they don't have the global economy of scale that other consumer electronics benefit from....

Re: RDS

IIRC, Radio 5 was given Radio 1's AM slot when Radio 1 went FM-only.

No radio bandwidth was harmed in the making of this station.

RISC OS comes to Raspberry Pi

Re: And

Yeah.... stuff the Kickstarter project Braben -- just get ArchElite on GOG.com

Classic game 'Elite' returns … on Kickstarter

Re: It is our duty to donate :-)

By the time you could afford the docking computer, you had to have learned the manual way anyway.

After weeks of struggling with the tap-tap-tap method on the C64 (no analogue stick), I reread the manual and spotted a little mention or "inertial dampers" or somesuch, eh voila! Nice, easy, controlled rotation.

Minnesota backpedals from online education ban

Why coursera, not udacity...?

Because for all their bitching about bad university standards, Udacity aren't really trying to be a university. They're turning themselves into a 21st century technology bootcamp. They're getting their next round of courses from all the usual suspects in the computing industry, which means they're going to end up being nothing more than a training camp and outsourced sales department for Microsoft et al.

They're not higher education by any stretch of the imagination.

Asus doubles up phone-slate combo's specs with Padfone 2

Re: Oh Deap Watch Out Asus

You clearly don't know the difference between a right angle and a rounded corner....

Re: interesting but...

Hmm.... but the combining the "brains" bit is important here -- I don't recall ever seeing a non-smart Android phone. A) The software doesn't exist. B) Would you honestly want a non-smart phone with the battery life of a smartphone (cos it's going to have to run off a smartphone processor anyway.

And in the end, why would you really need a dock? You can pick up a non-smart phone for a tenner in carphone warehouse -- the price of the docking mechanism is alone is going to be more than that, so your chosen target audience is going to be better served buying an independent phone+tablet.

The solution that YOU are looking for is a non-smart phone with 3G for modem purposes when coupled with a tablet. It doesn't need to dock, because Bluetooth will reach from your pocket to the table in front....

Unrootable: Mash these bits together to get a CLASSIFIED spyphone

Re: Whoa

Nononono.... if it was an Intel advert it would say "the first ingredient is Intel Inside" rather than the far more balanced "right now, the only available option is Intel". Because that's what it said, right?

Boffins baffled: HUGE EYEBALL washes up on Florida beach

Re: I can tell them.

I thought the difference between vertebrate and invertebrate eyes was immediately visible -- aren't all the nerves on the outside of an invertebrate eye, making it non-spherical, whereas our nerves went inside to make a better curve and therefore make the eye socket possible?

Lancashire man JAILED over April Jones Facebook posts

Well your mother was a...

[This post detailing the deviancy and congenital defects in RICHTO's family has been deleted due to gross indecency and the high risk of causing offence.]

This supercomputing board can be yours for $99. Here's how

Missed point.

Err... you may have missed the point.

1) They're suggesting that the power consumption is a barrier to wider adoption.

2) Also, what the Reg didn't cover was the other barrier to adoption: parallel computing suffers from a lack of skilled programmers. The first computing revolution was powered by self-taught hobbyist programmers on single-processor boards. The developers believe that this has created a generation of single-processor-centric programmers without the skills for parallel work. They want to create a hobbyist scene for parallel processing and foment a skills revolution in the parallel computing sphere, which will then (hopefully) allow genuine parallel processing to become part of mainstream computing, as opposed to the minimalist OS-managed parallelism of current-gen multicore processors.

Cynics viewpoint: what we have is a bunch of clever blokes who developed a clever processor and found that the people who could use it don't want it, and those who might want it couldn't use it, so they're repositioning it as a hobbyist teaching toy.

Optimist's viewpoint: a bunch of clever blokes developed a clever processor that solves a clever problem, and finding that the market couldn't take advantage of it, they decided to try to develop the market by themselves.

Bone-bothering boffins pull TINY fanged dinosaur from drawers

You're reading too far, then.

There's a big red banner there that says clearly what you're reading. The word "boffin" appears significantly below the *red* at the *top* of the page.

Assange movie portrays leaker as teen rebel

Praying on women...

...isn't that the missionary position?

Now Space Station forced to DODGE flying Japanese junk

What about this...?

I read on Slashdot that some artist wanted to throw a disc into orbit for alien archaeologists.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9231973/Artist_s_project_to_blast_gold_plated_artifact_disc_into_orbit?taxonomyId=19&pageNumber=1

My first thought was "great, more spacejunk".

Would a NASA cleanup respect moronic arts projects, or would they just sweep them all away?

Dinosaur Killer...?

Are you claiming the dinosaur killer originated in Earth's orbital path? I thought standard theory but it as an object dislodged from one of the planetless orbits called the asteroid belts.

Microsoft: 'To fill 6,000 jobs, we'll pay $10K per visa'

Re: 6000

Why pay that much for a visa when they could just hire them and have them based in other countries? Singapore, India, Europe... wherever. It's a global workforce now.

McFlurry McMisdemeanour costs Welsh lass McJob

Humour fail.

You may have missed the point where they used the cost of fine Ecuadorian after-dinner chocolate as a cheap dig at McDonald's's claim to only use the "finest" ingredients....

Dreaded redback spider's NEMESIS: Forgotten Captain Cook wasps

Red-shift?!?

So which solar system did you take the photograph from, and why do you find spiders and wasps more interesting than human beings?

You also appear to speak human -- do you also speak wasp?

No Scots word for vegetable...?

So do the English have their own, then, or do they all just rely on a mispronunciation of the French...?

Work for beer, Neil Gaiman's wife tells musicians

Re: Enough snark already

You might as well ask "what's the harm in opening a bar and asking for volunteer barmen?"

"You will be paid in free beer, hugs, merch, and the opportunity to chat up good looking young trendies while serving them a professionally-mixed cocktail."

What's wrong with that is that it cuts the bottom out of the market for bar staff, and it has rightly been rendered illegal by UK law (and probably EU law too), except when the bar in question is operating for a genuine community group or registered non-profit.

Which leads to the interesting possibility that the MU could take this muppet to court as a high-profile way of proving that the same labour laws that guarantee a (barely) living minimum wage apply to musicians as well as public lavatory cleaners.

Her response goes on about doing lots for free, because that's the way it's always been in showbusiness.

But that's the way it was in finance, law, etc too, with high profile employers exploiting unpaid workers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H "interns" with promises of experience, exposure, and the possibility of a paid job at a later date. The laws that stopped them doing that apply.